Simon Gros

---

The conversation unfolds as an extended attempt to diagnose what both speakers treat as a historically specific change in the character, tempo, and moral psychology of “progress,” especially in the West. Jordan Peterson frames Peter Thiel as an unusually philosophically oriented investor and entrepreneur, and presents the discussion less as a business interview than as an inquiry into cultural transmission, long-run technological transformation, and the background assumptions that make scientific ambition psychologically and politically sustainable. Thiel’s central claim, stated early and repeatedly qualified, is that material progress in the physical world has slowed markedly over roughly the last half century, even while innovation in the digital sphere has continued and, at moments, accelerated. He treats this divergence as empirically suggestive and culturally revealing: it invites questions about measurement, incentives, fear, regulation, institutional structure, and the metaphysical or anthropological premises that shape how societies authorize experimentation.

Thiel begins by acknowledging that “progress” is difficult to quantify across heterogeneous domains. He proposes that comparison problems arise immediately: one can point to recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and then contrast them with stubborn limits in areas such as neurodegenerative disease research, including Alzheimer’s. Any aggregate judgment requires weighting choices that are themselves contestable. Despite these methodological cautions, he argues that a broad historical pattern remains visible. In his telling, the West experienced centuries of accelerating advances across many fronts, with momentum building from the Renaissance and early modern period through the nineteenth century and into the first half of the twentieth. He locates an inflection point around 1970. Progress does not cease after that date, yet he believes its profile changes: dynamism concentrates in “bits” (software, computing, networks, mobile internet, and later crypto and AI), while “atoms” (the physical and infrastructural world of transportation, energy, manufacturing, aerospace, and many domains of engineering and applied science) exhibits slower gains.

To make this intuitive, Thiel reaches for a common-sense indicator: speed in transportation. He sketches a long arc in which successive eras repeatedly delivered faster ships, trains, cars, and planes, and then claims that this physical acceleration largely stalls in recent decades. He adds an economic proxy. If technological advance is assumed to translate into broadly shared material well-being, then prolonged stagnation or decline in living standards for later cohorts becomes an anomaly requiring explanation. In his remarks, the millennial generation in the United States functions as an example: he suggests they may, in several respects, be doing worse than their baby-boomer parents, which he treats as evidence that the sum of recent innovations has not straightforwardly produced generalized prosperity. The point is not presented as a comprehensive econometric thesis, but as a challenge to a simple narrative in which technological novelty automatically accumulates into rising welfare.

From this diagnosis, Thiel moves to a sociological and institutional account of why the overall picture is hard to see. He emphasizes hyper-specialization as a defining feature of contemporary knowledge production. Experts occupy ever-narrower domains and evaluate success largely by the internal standards of their subfields, which makes it difficult for non-specialists to assess whether a field is converging on major breakthroughs or producing large volumes of incremental work with limited real-world consequence. Thiel illustrates the problem through the familiar trope of repeated promises—cancer cures “in five years”—and by invoking a division-of-labor image associated with Adam Smith’s pin factory, intensified to an extreme. The implied consequence is epistemic fragmentation: modern societies may lack a shared vantage point from which to judge whether the aggregate outputs of science and engineering match earlier eras in transformative power.

He then introduces what he calls a political intuition: when an idea becomes taboo to discuss, that very taboo can be an indicator that something important is being suppressed. As an example, he recounts the case of a Stanford physicist and Nobel laureate, Bob Laughlin, who, in Thiel’s retelling, came to believe that a substantial portion of publicly funded scientific work amounted to rent-seeking, borderline fraud, or low-value incrementalism. Thiel claims Laughlin’s frankness was punished through loss of funding and professional consequences that cascaded to students. The story functions as more than an anecdote; it is used to support a broader interpretive stance: contemporary institutions may defend their legitimacy by stigmatizing systematic critiques of productivity and value, even when those critiques come from eminent insiders. Thiel presents this as one reason the “stagnation” hypothesis should be treated as at least plausible and worth investigating rather than dismissed as mere pessimism.

A further strand in Thiel’s argument links the claimed slowdown to a shift in cultural orientation that he dates symbolically to the late 1960s. He juxtaposes the Apollo moon landing with Woodstock, treating their temporal proximity as emblematic: a movement from outward exploration and ambitious collective projects toward inwardness, introspection, and forms of cultural preoccupation that privilege the psyche, identity, and personal experience over large-scale material transformation. He lists a range of phenomena under this inward turn—meditation, yoga, psychedelic experimentation, various modes of self-focused subculture, and what he describes as an intensification of atomization and “navel-gazing” in identity politics. In this framing, even political ideologies get reclassified. He distinguishes “Marxism,” which he characterizes as oriented toward objective material and economic conditions, from “cultural Marxism,” which he treats as a near-opposite, emphasizing interiority and symbolic struggle. The point is not offered as an academic typology; it is offered as a narrative device to suggest that modern societies may have redirected attention away from growth, engineering ambition, and concrete prosperity, and that this redirection correlates with stagnation in the “atoms” domain.

When Peterson raises a possible alternative explanation—regulation and bureaucratic accretion as a recurrent aftereffect of revolutions—Thiel resists treating the story as a timeless cycle. He argues for a more singular, world-historical disruption. In earlier eras, he suggests, inventions that produced net benefits tended to encourage further risk-taking rather than a broad political counter-movement designed to slow discovery. Thermonuclear weapons, in his view, represent a qualitatively different kind of achievement: a technological threshold that generates an enduring, background sense of apocalypse. Once such weapons are internalized culturally, the “progress” project is experienced as shadowed by the possibility that change leads toward catastrophe. He implies that this sensibility penetrates education and childhood formation, offering the illustrative remark that children were raised on different kinds of stories and expectations in the postwar period. The key claim is psychological and political: the West comes to perceive itself as living in an age where the stakes of innovation include existential risk.

This apocalyptic background, Thiel argues, helps explain why certain kinds of technological advance remain socially acceptable while others become heavily constrained. The “world of bits” appears, at least initially, safer: it seems less directly tied to physical violence, environmental disruption, or irreversible changes to the built world. The internet becomes, in his depiction, a kind of container in which intense conflict can play out largely in language and representation, giving participants the sense that the consequences stay within the medium. He concedes that this containment is imperfect and sometimes breaks down, yet he maintains that digital domains have been comparatively tolerated because they looked inert relative to technologies that immediately scale into weaponry, ecological impact, or mass physical transformation.

As the conversation proceeds, Thiel elaborates the dual-use character of modern innovation to reinforce why fear might be “understandable” even if he personally dislikes the resulting risk aversion. He lists areas where human capability now seems capable of outrunning governance and moral consensus: thermonuclear arsenals, environmental manipulation (with a remark that carbon dioxide may be one dimension among several), potential bioweapons, and AI integrated into weapon systems. He resists more fantastical narratives of disembodied superintelligence exterminating humanity, yet he emphasizes mundane pathways by which AI could become lethal: autonomous or semi-autonomous drones, electronic jamming that incentivizes removing “the human in the loop,” and a perceived inevitability to the technical “fix” of greater autonomy. The point is framed as a tension within a broadly pro-technology stance: even advocates of innovation can find specific trajectories unsettling when they couple computational capability to scalable violence.

From the technological and political register, the discussion turns to the relationship between science and Christianity. Peterson proposes that scientific inquiry historically relied on pre-scientific axioms: that the cosmos is intelligible, that human cognition can grasp that intelligibility through disciplined investigation, and that the accumulation of knowledge is good. He suggests that these premises have a faith-like character and may have been stabilized by a Christian ethos that shaped what counted as knowledge and what counted as legitimate progress. He further implies that when the scientific project detaches from that ethos, a “Luciferian” element can loom larger: knowledge and power expand without a shared moral horizon that constrains their use.

Thiel responds by shifting emphasis from theological metaphysics to what he calls Christian anthropology. He flags an internal comparative puzzle: Judaism and Islam also involve law-centered monotheistic traditions, yet the scientific revolution, as conventionally described, is associated with Christian Europe rather than emerging in the same way in the Islamic world. This suggests to him that the relevant difference may lie less in abstract doctrines about God and more in Christianity’s specific disclosure about human beings—especially violence, scapegoating, and social psychology. He presents René Girard as a guiding influence for this line of thought and describes Girard as a major intellectual presence in his Stanford years. In Girardian terms, the biblical story is said to re-narrate sacrifice from the standpoint of the victim rather than the violent community. Over time, this reorientation undermines scapegoating as an explanatory and social-stabilizing mechanism. Thiel suggests that as scapegoating loses credibility, societies become pressured to seek alternative, naturalistic explanations for misfortune and disorder, which can support the emergence of scientific inquiry.

He illustrates this dynamic through the example of witch trials. Against a simplistic story in which “science” disproved witchcraft and thereby ended persecutions, Thiel offers a different causal emphasis: communities eventually recognized that collective violence had been misdirected, that the accused were relatively innocent, and that the social mechanism had become morally and cognitively untenable. Once that recognition takes hold, explanations that rely on demonology or targeted blame become less acceptable, and a turn toward natural explanations becomes more attractive. He extends the point to other forms of scapegoating—such as medieval accusations that minorities poisoned wells—to suggest that rejecting these accounts forces a different style of causal reasoning.

This anthropological emphasis connects back to Thiel’s earlier concerns about modernity. If Christianity initiates an unraveling of traditional sacrificial and scapegoating structures, then modern societies inherit a volatile freedom: fewer stabilizing myths, fewer socially legitimate outlets for blame, and a heightened need for explanations that do not rely on communal violence. Thiel suggests that this unraveling cannot be reversed by simply returning to pagan structures; once deconstructed, they cannot be restored in their original social function, even if they survive as “demons,” psychological symbols, or cultural artifacts. Peterson explores a parallel account through desacralization: pagan worlds populated causality with many localized divinities, whereas monotheism consolidates the sacred and drains the environment of distributed spiritual agencies. He speculates that this might redirect curiosity toward hidden mysteries in matter, including alchemical motifs, thereby supporting an eventual scientific orientation.

A major conceptual pivot arrives with the discussion of imitation. Thiel presents Girard’s claim that human beings are deeply imitative, and that imitation is not confined to copying ideas or behaviors; it extends to desires. Imitative desire can converge groups on the same scarce objects, intensifying rivalry and making violence more likely. In this view, imitation is simultaneously the basis of cultural transmission—language learning, social formation, the continuity of institutions—and a destabilizing force that can drive status competition and conflict. Thiel argues that archaic societies developed laws and structures that limited mimetic rivalry, including rigid role constraints and hereditary occupational pathways, which reduced direct competition and helped contain conflict. Modernity, by contrast, dissolves many of these barriers, releasing mimetic dynamics into a comparatively open field.

Thiel connects this to a diagnosis of contemporary status games. He invokes Girard’s reading of the Ten Commandments, emphasizing the first commandment (orientation toward a single transcendent God) and the tenth (prohibition on coveting the neighbor’s goods). The interpretive claim is that when people cease “looking up,” they begin “looking around,” and intensive horizontal comparison can shift from collective wisdom to collective madness. Thiel characterizes late modern, liberal, atheist society as unusually saturated with such lateral comparison, producing unhealthy status competition and envy-driven social dynamics. Peterson links this to the problem of meta-games: societies coordinate multiple local games of imitation under higher-order principles, and he suggests that Christian categories reorganize this hierarchy.

At this point, the dialogue tests the concept of sacrifice. Peterson argues that maturity itself involves sacrifice in a practical psychological sense: deferring gratification, expanding temporal horizons, regulating impulses for future stability, learning social reciprocity, and accepting constraints that make cooperation possible. Thiel pushes back on the language, suggesting that many such behaviors can be framed as rational once future consequences are perceived, and warning that “sacrifice” can become a confused moral register that licenses irrational or exploitative demands. He applies this to academia and politics: he describes scenarios in which individuals are urged to endure burdens—such as pursuing credentials in hostile institutions—under the banner of noble sacrifice, even when the likely outcome is professional exclusion and personal waste. In his telling, a healthier move is sometimes “anti-sacrificial”: refusing demands that are experienced as irrational, self-negating, or imposed by institutions that treat compliance as proof of moral worth.

Peterson counters with a lived example from his own career trajectory, presenting his departure from academic roles as a trade in which he relinquished institutional security to preserve speech and agency. He argues that even if the outcome proves beneficial, the relinquishment remains real, so sacrificial language retains descriptive force. Thiel accepts the prudential aspect of Peterson’s choice while reiterating his concern: sacrifice can become a rhetorical mechanism that encourages people to accept unreasonable costs for causes that do not reciprocate or that cannot deliver the promised goods.

The disagreement opens into a theological distinction in Thiel’s Girardian framework. Thiel suggests that Christianity, as Girard interprets it, is fundamentally anti-sacrificial. Christ’s death exposes the scapegoat mechanism and is presented as the “last sacrifice,” intended to end the cycle of sacrificing others. He emphasizes that, even in the Passion narrative, Christ does not treat suffering as intrinsically desirable; the prayer at Gethsemane signals reluctance and dread rather than heroic appetite for martyrdom. From this angle, the ethical core becomes refusal to sacrifice others, refusal to legitimate violence, and pursuit of mercy. Thiel notes resonances with prophetic themes such as God desiring mercy over sacrifice, and he interprets Christ’s condensation of law into love of God and neighbor as a movement away from elaborate sacrificial systems.

The conversation then returns to Abraham and Isaac as a test case. Peterson treats the story as an emblem of paradox: willingness to sacrifice yields restoration, raising questions about what sacrifice truly means. Thiel proposes an unconventional emphasis. He suggests that interpretive tradition over-focuses on Abraham’s faith, especially when filtered through frameworks that valorize sacrifice, and that it neglects a childlike faith that trusts that God will provide a nonviolent resolution. Thiel identifies Isaac as embodying this childlike trust: Abraham believes he must sacrifice, while Isaac trusts that the sacrifice will not be required. Thiel links this to a broader claim about Christianity: when faith includes belief in resurrection and eternal life, what appears as sacrifice can take on the character of a rational or wise exchange, which also relates to the scriptural line about a “light yoke.” He contrasts this with readings that treat biblical narratives as merely archetypal or symbolic; in those cases, he implies, “sacrifice” can become an elevated moral ideal detached from a concrete promise of redemption, thereby encouraging a harsher ethic of loss.

By the end of the public portion, the conversation has developed a layered diagnosis rather than a single causal explanation. Thiel maintains that slowed material progress, intensified risk aversion, and the migration of innovation into digital domains are linked to a historically new consciousness of catastrophe, made plausible by twentieth-century technologies that scale to extinction-level outcomes. He situates this within cultural changes that redirected aspiration from outward conquest to inward preoccupation, and within institutions that fragment knowledge through specialization while policing critiques of their productivity. He then reframes these developments through Girardian anthropology: modernity inherits Christianity’s exposure of scapegoating and therefore loses older mechanisms for stabilizing mimetic rivalry, leaving contemporary societies vulnerable to status competition, envy, and the volatility of crowds. Peterson, while often sympathetic, presses for a role for sacrifice as a developmental and social principle, and for an account of how religious axioms may have underwritten the scientific project’s confidence. Thiel responds by treating Christianity less as a metaphysical scaffolding for science than as an anthropological revelation about violence and imitation, and he insists that the Christian message, properly read, constrains sacrificial logic rather than endorsing it.

The segment ends with a clear indication that the discussion is incomplete. Peterson signals that a further portion will continue elsewhere, focusing on “the faith of a child,” on whether Thiel is temperamentally inclined toward the darker edge of analysis, and on what follows psychologically and culturally from sustained attention to apocalypse and catastrophe. The public exchange therefore functions as an extended framing: a joint effort to describe a perceived civilizational shift in the meaning of progress, the ethics of innovation, and the psychic costs of living in a world where technological capability increasingly appears inseparable from existential danger.